Mario Ruspoli

The Cave of Lascaux: The Final Photographs

by Mario Ruspoli

Publisher's Description

Discovered accidentally by two boys in France in 1940, the frescoed cave of Lascaux is the most breathtaking glimpse modern man has had of the mysteries of Stone Age culture. Populated with powerful and haunting images of magnificent horses, bison, deer, and aurochs, the walls of the cave drew overwhelming numbers of visitors, whose pressing warmth, breath, and lights posed a new danger to the paintings, encouraging a proliferation of destructive molds and fungi that could have consumed the images forever. Though Lascaux was sealed in 1963 by order of the Ministry of Culture, prehistorian Mario Ruspoli was allowed inside the cave in 1891-83, to scrupulously record its now permanently inaccessible treasures. Here are 150 of these photographs, documented and discussed by Ruspoli and other noted scholars in prehistoric art.